


Afterburning

by insignem



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-11-01 23:49:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17877101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/insignem/pseuds/insignem
Summary: "As Michael tinkered in his Airstream, drafting impossible blueprints, he sometimes thought that his chances of getting them home were about as high as his chances of being close to Alex again. He didn’t know which made him sadder."Work in progress detailing Michael and Alex's reactions to reuniting after ten years; will follow canon.





	Afterburning

**Author's Note:**

> I needed to get into their heads a little! Dipping my toes into this fandom and into writing fic for the first time in a long time. This will likely follow canon with a little embellishment, so I'm being intentionally vague as to what happened in the past - don't want to contradict what ends up being revealed. 
> 
> I made up everything about military personnel files - hope it's not terribly inaccurate.

Michael knew that Alex was coming back to Roswell. He’d known possibly before Alex himself had even learned he’d be stationed in New Mexico, thanks to a nifty and definitely illegal alert he’d set up that notified him of any changes to Alex’s personnel file.

He was reasonably certain of its security – traceability had certainly been on his mind - but his skills tended more towards chemistry and physics, calculations he could perform on paper and solutions he could trace with his own hand. The world of codes and programming was shadowy in contrast. But after news of Alex’s first deployment had reached Roswell, too many sleepless nights had driven him to research a discrete way to keep tabs.

The information contained in the personnel file was dry and impersonal: it told him where Alex was stationed, his training record, promotions and commendations he received, and not much else. Once, a disciplinary action had flagged his alert: apparently, Alex had thrown fists with a fellow serviceman over the use of derogatory language. The report didn’t specify what sort of language, but Michael had a guess, and it made him feel closer to Alex than he had in years.

He knew it was a little pathetic, to be clinging to news of his high school ex – who he hadn’t seen or spoken to since things had ended, since Alex had left – but he couldn’t shake the need to know that Alex was okay, no matter how far apart they were, and no matter how wrecked he’d been by their falling out. It had been a solace and a torture over the years, to know just that Alex was alive and where he was, with too much empty space left for Michael to fill in the gaps with tormented imaginations.

Sometimes, it just served to enforce the distance between them – Alex was based in Texas between deployments, but he might as well have been on Mars, as far as their relationship went. As Michael tinkered in his Airstream, drafting impossible blueprints, he sometimes thought that his chances of getting them home were about as high as his chances of being close to Alex again. He didn’t know which made him sadder.

~

Detailed health records were not part of the personnel file, and Michael hadn’t wanted to dig too deeply out of some desire to respect Alex’s privacy (the irony of which was not lost on him). About ten months ago, though, when an alert had come through that Alex’s location had changed to the Balad Air Base, Michael had googled it to discover that it was the site of a Level I trauma center and the U.S. military’s largest hospital in Iraq. The fear that had flooded him in that instant was unlike anything he’d experienced before: a fist squeezing his stomach so tightly that he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything other than desperately search for more information. Normally, he wouldn’t check on the file unless an alert came through, but in the days that followed Alex’s move to Balad he checked it almost hourly, feeling stupid relief every time the words “Status: Active” were still at the top.

He’d almost managed to convince himself that the move had simply meant Alex had been stationed at a different base, when an alert came through that Alex’s location had changed to Landstuhl, Germany. He was with Isobel, who was babbling about the latest veteran fundraiser she was organizing, when his phone lit up. He’d had to fight to keep color in his face, to prevent his voice from shaking as he asked her a question he already knew the answer to: “Hey, Is- where’s that hospital they ship wounded soldiers to from the Middle East?”

She gave him an odd look. “Since when do you care about any of the veteran stuff?”

He forced his expression into a smirk. “Well you’ve been talking my ear off about it for the past ten minutes, figured I had to ask a question to at least make it look like I was interested.”

She scoffed and rolled her eyes in the most Isobel of expressions, then crushed him with a casual, “Most of them get sent to Germany before they come back to U.S. I think the hospital is called Landstahl or something.”

“Cool, Is!” Michael said through his teeth, that clenching tightness in his gut coming back and dizziness threatening to knock him to the floor. “Gotta go,” he managed, ignoring Isobel’s annoyance as he got up and tried to walk like a normal person. He got into his truck and fumbled through his glove box for the flask of acetone he kept there, dimly aware that the glass in his windows was vibrating, atoms agitated and on the verge of shattering.

A large swig helped get that back under control, and nausea minorly at bay, he took stock: Alex wasn’t dead. He wasn’t dead. He was seriously hurt but he’d been stable enough to be transported to Germany. Another swig. Michael slumped forward, pressing his forehead against the wheel. He got his breathing under control, put the truck in drive, and didn’t stop for a very long time.

~

Over the next few weeks, news of the normal sort started to trickle in. Alex Manes, Roswell’s own heroic son, had lost part of his leg in an explosion over in Iraq. There were limited details, but he was recovering at a military hospital in Germany. Michael had started to breathe again, but his sleep was wracked by nightmares, tortured dreams that saw him walking through starscapes hand-in-hand with Alex, only for a star to explode where Alex was standing, leaving nothing but flames and Michael’s hand, burning, star-flames searing his flesh. One nasty night, Michael woke soaked in sweat after a dream where a machete-wielding Jesse Manes had attacked him, cutting off Michael’s leg at the knee.

He sleep-walked through the days, exhausted from his horror-filled nights, until a new alert pinged through that Alex was back on U.S. soil at Walter Reed. His status now read “Medical Leave.” Nothing changed for a while, and Michael’s nightmares started to fade. He had dreams of Alex walking towards him with a perfectly-fitted prosthetic made of the same material as his crash fragments, the alien tech gleaming in sunshine and catching a light in Alex’s eyes and smile. Unsettled at how these dreams made him feel, Michael nonetheless began drafting a design for a prosthetic, hopelessly hypothetical without the necessary materials – or the chance that he could actually give something like this to Alex, even if he could make it tangible - but it gave him something to occupy himself, and he was grateful for it.

By the time the next alert came through, Michael had almost forgotten his original purpose, but had been deep into analyzing the fragment’s chemical structure and attempting to recreate it in his shitty and likely hazardous Airstream lab.

He blinked a couple times, not quite comprehending what he was seeing at the top of the personnel file. The status was back to active (what kind of insane person loses a leg and goes back to active status, Michael marveled), and there was a memo reading: Airman Manes has been discharged from Walter Reed and will return to active duty in Roswell, New Mexico.

In all the ten years Alex had been in the Air Force, Michael had never once imagined that he’d end up stationed back in Roswell. Part of him wanted to get in his truck and flee from the news, flee from the possibility of ever seeing Alex Manes outside his head again. He knew he’d been keeping tabs on a person who didn’t exist: the Alex in his head was not the corporeal Alex who’d broken his heart ten years ago, and Michael didn’t think he could face the crushing reality of the past they shared if he came face-to-face with the true, flesh-and-bone Alex. But he didn’t think Isobel and Max would take it well if he up and left, so he stayed put, a nameless sensation taking root in the pit of his stomach. If he’d given it a name, he might have called it dread. He might also have called it hope.

~

Eventually, news of Alex’s homecoming spread through town. A date was given and a parade was planned, which Michael had no intention of attending. His willpower was weaker than he’d thought, though, because when the day rolled around, he found himself parked strategically in his truck – a spot where he could catch a glimpse of the proceedings without being noticed himself. He wasn’t close enough to really see Alex’s face, but he knew his form instantly when the car carrying him rolled past. His face felt hot and something roared in his ears at the reality of Alex’s physical presence; sweaty hands shaking, he drove away.

The next few weeks were some of the strangest Michael had ever experienced. The specter of Alex’s presence – the lurking possibility that they could run into each other on the street, at the Wild Pony, anywhere – hung over him desperately, leading him to retreat to the ranch, more hermit-like than ever, deeply engrossed in his experiments and back to sleeping terribly, hazy dreams of confrontations taunting him.

The tension bubbled over eventually, leading to a raucous evening at the Wild Pony and a night spent in the drunk tank at the Sheriff’s Department. The verbal – and physical – sparring with Max in the morning had been a distraction from the ever-present throbbing in his brain, a bouncing ball inside his skull that was only intensifying now as he drove back to the ranch, triggered by the powerful combination of Alex’s ghostly proximity and the threat of their secret’s exposure.

He was already primed for explosivity when he returned home to the ranch to find the military swarming and the news that he was losing both his job and the only place he felt connected to home in one swoop. Shaking to quell the desperate rage, he turned to see an airman peering in his windows. Barely thinking – barely pausing to register what he was doing – he strode over and grabbed the man’s arm.

The months of knowing that Alex was coming back, the glimpse of him from a distance at the parade, the weeks of agonizing over this very moment – none of it prepared Michael for the devastating shock of Alex Manes standing in front of him for the first time in ten years.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr [here](http://insignem.tumblr.com/). Thanks for reading - more to come!


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